Rules to trigger due dates only in business days

It’s been 5 years since this was submitted and still doesn’t look like it’s on the product roadmap… Like others in this thread have suggested, simply rolling out the “skip weekends” feature that’s available in other places would be EXTREMELY helpful (and feels like a reasonable enough ask). We have a number of tasks/subtasks being created by automations that will end up being scheduled for a Saturday or Sunday because of this gap in functionality.

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I think I spoke too soon yesterday! I am unsure if it’s possible to skip weekends everywhere, but it appears to be possible in more places than I thought (I have enterprise, YMMV)

  • Using relative dates in a project template, there’s an option to skip weekends when a project is created from that template (miraculously for this one, even when using a rule to convert a task into a project using the template!)
  • It’s also possible to set a whole project to use an alternate schedule. It’s just… mostly hidden :slight_smile: In the list view, use the down caret to the right of the project title, and choose “manage dependencies”. In the resulting menu, at the bottom, choose “project settings” under “work schedule” and you can then choose among “business days (M-F)”, “every day”, and “custom” (which lets you select whichever days-of-the-week you want).
  • I don’t know if this will be universally respected in asana, or if rules will ignore it sometimes the way they ignore project template settings. But it’s something, at least
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Ugh, didn’t mean to hit submit – one other thing to note is that, in list view of a project, if you click on a due date for a task in a dependency chain, you’ll see a note that says “project dependency is
currently set to…”. There you can open the buffer settings and you’ll get a menu that looks almost exactly like the menu I referred to above, except it doesn’t have the work schedule part at the bottom. I believe this is what confused me

Pleeeeeease introduce this. This causes a nightmare for automating against SLAs!

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Hi.

I’ve added the flowasana app, but it is expensive, so it is not a long-term solution. Any updates on the “Considered” status? We really need this. I cannot have tasks being assigned to people on weekends (it makes them really mad). And assigning tasks and setting due dates is the point of most workflows… so please… make it right!

I was in an Asana session in Atlanta recently and you can do this with the AI rules right now and they said it was slated for work without AI soon.

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Glad to see this marked considered, awaiting in eager anticipation!

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Really hoping to see this feature! We don’t have enough AI Studio credits to keep it up and running full time :sweat_smile:

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Same. Our credits are being eaten alive by this rule.

If anyone stumbles on this post, and if you have Enterprise, use Custom Scripts! It is free :stuck_out_tongue:

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The biggest single drawback of Asana is it’s inability to understand the very basic project scheduling concept of working days, working weeks and weekends.

My team works Monday to Friday with a few part timers. I have 0% interest in what’s happing in the next 7 days (this week in Asana) and 110% interest in what is happing this working week (up to this Friday). If we’re trying to meet a deadline, the key is what we can get done before the end of the working week, not in the next 7 days. Same with next week, which isn’t 14 days for us, but the following working week from next Monday to next Friday.

Each user should be able to set their working week and working hours in preferences, or ideally their working days as some people work different days throughout the week.

We should then be able to code rules and create templates that simply shift due dates and deadlines for tasks assigned to a user based on their actual working life, or for the team as a whole. Asana shouldn’t set a date as due on a Saturday or Sunday for me or my team as we don’t work weekends.

In searching for a solution I found this thread from 2019(!) – plus many other threads – and still nothing in terms of implementation. I’ve dipped in and out of Asana over the years. Quite like the design, and each time there are more really useful features, but this very basic one is still missing. We’re giving Asana another try now, but really can’t understand why the development team, who I assume have working weeks, hasn’t implemented working times and working weeks. It’s just such a basic feature of project scheduling that I can’t quite believe a project management platform still doesn’t offer it despite over half a decade of requests from users.

So, to the Asana team: Are you ever planning to implement this feature? If so, when? If not, then why?

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Hi @Dan_Salmon,

Thank you for adding this context.

Note that the topic is marked considered .

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+1 to this request! In addition to weekend awareness, it would also be amazing to be able to set custom blackout dates to prevent Asana from auto-scheduling tasks on organizational holidays, like when auto-updating tasks using the Gantt view.

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I just saw this pop up in my rules today!

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This is it.

Project customization and views

While the Work Schedule is a great move in the right direction the logic used for rules is still lacking. Currently the logic is that the relative rules first calculate the due date based on calendar days and then adjust the result to the nearest work schedule day. In my team we have set SLAs for each action that are defined in business days. I would like to be able to set in rule that a specific task due date should be calculated using only business days. Please add that Asana!

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Hello! I’ve tried this feature. I’ve selected M-F AND confirmed that the selection was retained (there is no “save” so it’s difficult to tell if it changes to what is selected). Then I attempted to create tasks using a task template I have that has relative dates associated with it. Unfortunately it still generated tasks on the weekend.

Have you actually used it and had any success with it? If so, is there a trick to it? For me it appears to be settings that do nothing.

Thanks!

Chasity

Same here, I’ve tried and it’s not working as expected. This means a lot to me and my clients who have a monthly task for skipping Sundays in their activities scheduling

I did some testing and its working for my setup/

I’m only using the default Work schedule of “Business days (M-F)” that is now native and the default.

How it’s working, I’m using it as part of a bundled rule:

  • A rule is triggered when a task is marked as complete
  • Set due date to
    • 2days after the date this rule is triggered, “Use Work Schedule to set date”

This ensures that when the task is moved and redated, the due date that gets set will not be set for a Saturday or Sunday, but instead the Monday.

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This still isn’t resolved and is an issue when using task templates for repeatable processes. I want to be able to use a task template and have all the subtask dates follow/adhere to the work schedule. Seems it can happen using rules, but not task templates for some reason, which is very frustrating. I do NOT want to have to create a rule and rely on a custom field trigger when i should be able to have the task template work

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